


Escape the day

by eleutheria_has_won



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV), Iskryne Series - Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette
Genre: Gen, I'm a little early for Lupercalia but it's fine, Psychic Wolves
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-03
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:06:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22548268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eleutheria_has_won/pseuds/eleutheria_has_won
Summary: Because their lives are a monster-of-the-week bullshit extravaganza, it turns out necromancy is a real thing that people can really do.Because their lives are too weird to exist, this turns out to be the best thing that ever happens to Xander.
Relationships: Rupert Giles & Xander Harris, Rupert Giles & Xander Harris & Willow Rosenberg & Buffy Summers, Xander Harris/Trauma
Comments: 8
Kudos: 32
Collections: Psychic Wolves for Lupercalia





	1. boy with a broken soul

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ProwlingThunder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProwlingThunder/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Halloween](https://archiveofourown.org/works/805305) by [ProwlingThunder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProwlingThunder/pseuds/ProwlingThunder). 



> so, ProwlingThunder enabled 100% of this. Thanks, PT. For those unfamiliar, this story is a continuation of PT's story "Halloween" -- you *can* read this story without that one, but you're going to be very confused in the process.

_ Dig up her bones but leave the soul alone  
_ _ Boy with a broken soul  
_ _ Heart with a gaping hole  
_

\-- MS MR, “Bones”

Xander was doing okay.

He got up. He went to school. He made stupid jokes at Buffy and Willow, who rolled their eyes or giggled, as their respective personalities would have it. He engaged in life-threatening supernatural shenanigans a couple times a month. He did homework, if he had time. He went home. 

He was doing okay. 

His parents hadn’t gotten any less shit, but that was okay, he was used to it. He knew how to get around them. Supernaturally speaking, they hadn’t had anything  _ really  _ bad go down lately. Some vamps, a cursed book that needed to be uncursed, that weird freaking cult led by Buffy’s old crush or something -- nothing too earth-shattering. No apocalypsii, anyway. So that’d been cool. 

He was doing okay.

He’d started having trouble sleeping, for whatever reason. Nightmares, yeah, but he’d always had those, pretty much ever since the time Jesse died and  _ then _ tried to eat his face. (And then died again, thank you, Buffy.) More than that, he just couldn’t fall asleep anymore. He’d lay there for hours, staring at the ceiling, and just -- nope! So he’d gotten into the habit of wandering around town during the day, trying to tire himself out enough to sleep at night. And when that didn’t work, he started using the time to work on his homework. His grades were better than they’d ever been in his  _ life _ . 

And they were a really good reminder of where -- and  _ who _ \-- he was. Private Alexander Harris hadn’t done high school homework in years. 

But he was fine. He was okay. 

The girls didn’t really talk about Halloween, much. They all did that thing sometimes where they’d be in the middle of doing something and then realize they’d been, like, setting the table in the style of a French nobleman’s feast. Or, y’know, doing knife tricks. It was actually really funny watching Willow smack into walls because she kept forgetting she couldn’t go through them. Xander didn’t talk about it much, either. He didn’t know what kinds of things he had picked up from Alex that the girls had noticed. 

But that was fine. He was getting used to Private Harris just -- happening, sometimes. There wasn’t a military base in Sunnydale in this world, and that took a weird amount of adjusting to, but it was fine. It wasn’t like  _ he  _ was the soldier homesick for the base where he’d spent most of his adult life. That was just the magical hangover talking. 

Wandering around the town on weekends and after school was doing great things for his knowledge of Sunnydale, though. So far: three new shortcuts, five spooky secondhand shops, a janky abandoned park with a rusted-out playground. 

And a ridiculous amount of animal shelters. Or, maybe that was just him, twitching every time he heard a dog bark. He kept -- okay, it was crazy, it was  _ so  _ crazy, but he kept walking past them. On purpose, sort of. He kept walking  _ into  _ them, looking at the dogs. (Feeling his fingers itch for the touch of fur.) He’d spent one whole Saturday _ volunteering _ like some kind of boy scout, scrubbing puppy shit out of blankets and ignoring how nostalgically amused  _ Private Alexander Harris who had been on base laundry duty  _ felt about that, throwing a ball for dumb bouncy domesticated not-wolves over and over and over to get them some exercise, and he stormed out at the end of the day forcing back tears with gritted teeth. And yet he still. Kept walking by them. A horrible form of desperate self-medication that only left him angry at himself because Aurore wasn't -- had never been --  _ wasn’t _ a  _ dog _ , it wasn’t going to be the  _ same _ , he was acting  _ crazy-pants _ but he couldn’t stop. He knew it wouldn’t work and he still couldn’t stop. 

He couldn't stop his fingers from itching for the touch of wolf fur. And he couldn’t stop himself from jumping every time he saw a big dog out of the corner of his eye because he hadn’t been able to hear them in the packsense. And he couldn’t stop himself himself from every time he saw a picture of a wolf from going "Oh, right, a wood wolf, the small version that's not sentient, so petite and dumb next to a  _ real  _ wolf" and then he would always remember that "NO, that's what WOLVES are SUPPOSED TO LOOK LIKE, there are NO SUCH THING AS DIRE WOLVES."

But he was fine. 

It wasn’t a huge thing. 

He learned to stop saluting and calling Giles "sir". He learned to not be weird around Buffy, or Cordelia. He pushed the memories of the stuff that happened away. He was fine. 

(But he couldn't push away the memories of what it meant to be Auroresbrother, to be part of the pack. He couldn't push away the craving for comforting wolf fur to sink his hands into and the scent of his wolfname in his nose.)

Xander was okay.

(Every time he tried to sleep he felt the silent hole in his fucking brain like a missing limb.)

  
  


Xander was not okay.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fuck it, I was going to post the next whole set of scenes in one go, but nope I am impatient, here you go.

_Dark twisted fantasy turned to reality  
_ _Kissing death and losing my breath_  
_Midnight hours, cobble street passages  
_ _Forgotten savages, forgotten savages_

\-- MS MR, “Bones”

So: here was what actually happened. 

On Halloween night, some crazy guy who may or may not have been Giles’s old boyfriend did a magic spell with a statue that turned all the costumes from his janky costume shop into not actually costumes. This was the summary that Xander got from Willow, who was actually there and in her right mind for most of it, albeit disembodied. This cleared up exactly nothing for Xander, except for the tiny question of “why did this happen?” which turned out to be a pretty unimportant question compared to the slightly more important question of “ _what_ happened?”

Because that entire story? Told him basically zilch about all the stuff he _actually_ needed to understand. 

Here was what Xander’s Halloween looked like: 

Xander remembered getting into his soldier costume. Xander remembered sneaking out of the house to go meet up with Buffy and Willow for the chaperone gig. He remembered setting out with the kids they were chaperoning, and keeping an eye on time, and starting to think that hey, they should head back soon-- 

\--and then he remembered not remembering any of that. He remembered standing on a dark street, and not knowing where he was, or what was going on. 

He remembered reaching out for his brother in his mind -- his wolf-brother, Aurore, the dire wolf partner who marked him as Private Alexander Harris of the Sunnydale pack more than any uniform or rank or nametag, his brother who shared the other half of his mind and heart -- and he remembered feeling _nothing_.

The timeline got… wobbly, after that. Oh, he remembered running around as Private Harris, and all that. And he remembered beating the crap out of Larry the Pirate, who he only recognized _after_ he was standing in the middle of a warehouse, staring at his gun trying to figure out why it wasn’t a gun anymore, and then thought “wait, why would I even have a gun?” 

In the couple weeks following Halloween, he’d gotten a few hazy memories that felt more like fever dreams -- ones that he couldn’t pin down to any point in the timeline of the Halloween that Willow had told him about. Given that Giles had started talking about parallel universes and switching places and all, he was pretty sure those came from wherever the hell _he’d_ been while Private Harris was running around in his body like a wolfless jackass. 

The thing was… the thing was. When good ol’ Alex had shown up in his brain, Xander Harris had basically gone _poof_ . Just, zip, zilch, nada. No memories whatsoever. Private Harris hadn’t remembered jack-all about _Xander_ Harris’s life.

So it made sense that when the spell ended and the regularly scheduled Xander had come _back_ , Private Alex should have disappeared the same way, right? Totally made sense. 

Except for how it totally wasn’t what happened.

Instead, Xander had spent the last couple weeks stumbling around feeling like a freaking _Batman villain_ . Everytime he did and said anything, he’d get his reaction in bizarre stereo; Private Alex was right there with Xander Harris in his head, _all the time_ . He’d look at a freaking _soda can,_ and one part of him would say “Yeah, so?” and the other part of him would say “Oh, _sweet_ , they never have this kind in the mess!”

Sometimes it was even useful! Private Alex’s reflexes were pretty good at not getting dead of vampire, or whatever else was trying to kill them that week. Private Alex’s memories of doing high school geometry were almost helpful when it came to… doing highschool geometry. Wow, so helpful.

(Sometimes it was just… weird, more than anything. Like, hey! Noticing those nifty “other person’s face” shaped bruises on Giles’s knuckles after Halloween! Thanks, Private Alex -- that sure was helpful!)

And sometimes it was really not useful at all , like when his parents said something that Xander alone would have just been able to ignore, same old same old, and instead he started _fuming_ because fuck them, fuck this house, I signed up to get _away_ from this shit and I _got_ away from this shit, I got _out,_ so what the hell am I doing here when I could be literally anywhere else?

And then Xander had to shove his head down so his parents couldn’t see his expression, and remind himself that he was 16 years old and had nowhere better to be, over and over until he believed it again. 

Which was, just, awesome. Super. _Really_ doing great things for his ability to just, y’know, be normal and let stuff roll off his back.

(And if he kept losing sleep and losing his temper and losing his goddamn mind to the empty hole in his brain where _good ol’ Private Alex_ insisted a wolf was supposed to be, well -- that wasn’t helping either.)

The only time that the different bits of his brain managed to sack up and get along was when the gang played the “try not to die” game with whatever baddie had crawled out of the Sunnydale woodwork this time. Alex found this a comfortably familiar routine, in its own way, and Xander liked how the threat of imminent death made all his other cares just float away, so nice.

So when Buffy dropped down next to him and Willow at lunch with a “I’m about to ruin our collective day, sorry” look on her face, Xander put his sandwich down and thought, _Well thank fucking god, I was getting sick of not almost dying this week_ , and actually kind of meant it.

“So, I fought a zombie dog last night,” Buffy said in the same perkily casual voice she used when she was bluffing to Snyder. 

Willow jumped and choked a little, then swallowed hard and gave Buffy a bug-eyed look. “What, really?” she said, “Like a… rotting, bits falling off kind of zombie?” Her nose wrinkled in confusion -- it was, frankly, kind of adorable. 

(Man, he thought wistfully, life would have been so much easier if he had any kind of interest in Willow like that -- but yeah, no, instead he got to nurse a hopeless crush on _Buffy_ , who would literally rather date a vampire. And he didn’t even have that, these days -- Private Alex saw Buffy the same way that Xander saw Willow, on account of them being kinda-sorta-siblings in the backassward way of the wolf pack. The last remnants of Xander’s crush has dwindled and died before he’d even noticed it was happening.)

Buffy tilted her head, looking off in the distance while she made a thinking face. “Mmm, kind of,” she said. “No drippy bits, thank goodness, but it was kind of…” She squinted and made a gesture with her hands like she was trying to mime a trash compactor. “Very roadkill-pizza, except for the part where it was walking around. _Trying_ to walk around,” she corrected. “The road-pizza thing made that kind of hard.”

“Wow, sounds like a really challenging fight,” Xander snorted, trying not to feel disappointed. There went his afternoon plans -- one zombie did not an adventure make. 

“Yeah, I felt kind of bad about re-killing it,” Buffy admitted. “But Giles was pretty clear about not just letting it walk around and, I don’t know, infect the water supply or whatever, sorry, I pretty much tuned out at that point.”

“Well, yeah,” Willow said, looking relieved. “A zombie dog would probably have all kinds of diseases going on, w-what with being dead and rotting and stuff.”

“Ugh, don’t remind me,” Buffy said. “I had to take, like, three showers before I felt clean again.”

“Not that this isn’t thrilling lunch conversation,” Xander interrupted. “Really, I’m thrilled. But I have a question, are zombie dogs just a thing that happens in Sunnydale now? Is this just life for us? Zombie dogs?”

“Giles is pretty sure there’s a necromancer running around somewhere,” Buffy said. “We’re going to try to figure out where they’re, y’know, having their corpsey fun and shut it all down before he has to go chaperone the field trip this weekend.”

Xander blinked. “Wait, field trip?”

“Oh, that’s right!” Willow said, perking up. “Mr. Pereira -- y’know, the one who teaches honors biology? He’s leading an optional field trip to Los Angeles this weekend to see the tar pits museum. I didn’t know Giles was going, that’s awesome!”

“Wow, the _tar pits_ museum,” Xander said, “Sounds exciting.”

“Come on, it totally is!” Willow protested. “They have a mammoth skeleton, and saber tooth tiger bones, and a whole bunch of other stuff that got preserved in the tar.”

Xander paused. “Okay, that actually does sound kind of cool.”

Buffy, on the other hand, was frowning. “Yeah, sorry -- after last night, I’m all burned out on dead things.”

“Oh, well,” Willow said, abashed. “If you change your mind, signups are still open until Wednesday.” She looked a little wistful.

“Y’know, Willow, I’ll go with you,” Xander said on impulse. 

“You will?” Willow brightened immediately, smiling.

“Gives me something to do this weekend instead of sitting around staring at math homework until it makes sense,” he joked.

“Well, we can try to get that done on the bus ride down,” Willow assured him, completely missing the point.

“Oh, _yay_ ,” Xander said.

Lunch conversation eventually moved on to _non-_ corpse-related topics, which was great. Buffy and Willow talked about book reports, weekend plans, and Xander did his best to finish his sandwich and not think about anything except yay, math homework. He looked up, though, when the girls’ conversation stuttered. The hairs on the back of his neck went up; a presence loomed behind him. 

“Dillon,” Buffy said with the fakest of smiles and a voice full of knives. 

Xander muffled a groan.

Now, normally Xander would be afraid of Dillon. Dillon was 200 pounds of misplaced aggression in a linebacker body, and those meaty fists could put Xander on the ground any day of the week --

( _No_ , said Alex’s reflexes, smugly settling into Xander’s limbs. _No, he really could not. A little pissant like this? I’d like to see him try._ ) 

\-- but right this very second, Xander was running on maybe 2 hours of sleep, and the previous night had sucked in a serious way. Every time he closed his eyes, it’d been flashes of combat that made no sense, feeling of grief and loss unconnected to anything he could understand. Or, worse, wolf-dreams of running through the woods, chasing rabbits. He kept waking up with hellish shin-splints and a wet face. It made for a _pretty cranky Xander_. He was too fucking tired to be scared of someone like Dillon at this point.

“Not today, Dillon,” Xander drawled, staring down at his lunch very determinedly.

“Heard you’ve been getting pretty good grades, lately,” Dillon rumbled. 

Yeah, insomnia was great for that! Xander didn’t say. 

“We’re in the same geometry class, right?” Dillon said, trying to sound casually speculative and mostly just hitting stupid. “You done the homework yet?”

“None of your business,” Xander mumbled around a mouthful of sandwich.

And then there was a hand on his shoulder. 

“It’s my business now,” Dillon said triumphantly. “Get it out -- looks like I’ve got some homework to turn in.”

“Yeah, in your dreams, you idiot prick,” Xander muttered… loudly. 

Dillon's hand clamped down. “Don't fucking test me, nerd,” he rumbled, fingers digging in. "I'm not gonna say it again, get your fucking _homework_ out--"

Xander’s head snapped up, and he stared Dillon down, feeling a sudden vicious anger welling up like blood from a stab wound. “And I said _walk away_ , Dillon. I’m _not your homework monkey_.” Xander didn’t know what kind of fury was in his eyes, but it was enough that Dillon flinched. 

There was an awkward moment as Dillon -- 200 pound Dillon -- parsed the fact that he’d just flinched away from a 140 pound skinny nerd. 

Xander was gripped with a sudden vertigo, and a vivid embarrassment. “Go shake some other kid down for grades if that’s how you get your jollies,” he said, picking his sandwich up again. “I’m not in the mood for this shit today.”

“I bet you don’t even have the homework done, dipshit,” Dillon spat out, pulling back. “You’ve probably been blowing the teacher for those grades like a cheerleader.” Given the aggressive leer on his face, he clearly thought this was a devastating retort. 

“Sure, you tell yourself that,” Xander said dryly. 

Dillon’s face sank into slack-jawed confusion; his jaw worked a couple times, but in the end he left without a word. With every step that he got further from their table, his shoulders bunched higher and higher in rage; by the time he’d made it to the vending machines, he was grabbing the nearest nerd he could get his hands on and slamming them against the wall with thwarted fury.

“Dickhead,” Xander murmured, turning back to his lunch.

That was about the time when he realized that Buffy and Willow were staring at him. Willow’s eyes were like saucers; Buffy’s eyebrow was reaching new heights of skepticism.

“What?” he said defensively.

“Since when do _you_ talk back to _Dillon?_ ” Buffy said. 

“Since… now, I guess,” Xander said awkwardly, diving into his sandwich to give himself a good reason to _never speak again._

“Uh _huh,_ ” Buffy hummed disbelievingly, tracking Dillon’s progress across the room. The poor nerd he’d seized was waving their hands up in front of their face, flinching back when Dillon’s shoulders twitched.

“W-well,” Willow stammered, warily picking her fork back up. “It’s nice not to have to redo the homework?”

Xander snorted. “Yeah,” he said. “Because I’ve _definitely_ done the homework.”

Willow rounded on him. “Xander!”

“I’ll be right back,” Buffy said, slipping out of her seat, her eyes fixed on Dillon’s altercation like a hunting hawk. Across the room, Dillon’s victim yelped as Dillon slammed him against the cement-block wall again. “He’s going to give Neil a concussion if he keeps that up.”

“Have fun,” Xander said, and went back to ignoring Willow's scolding.


End file.
